DOCSLIB.ORG

The Conflicting Voices in Tony Harrison's Poetry

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Conflicting Voices in Tony Harrison's Poetry Vol 4. No.4 December 2009 Journal of Cambridge Studies 103 View metadata,The citation Conflicting and similar papers Voices at core.ac.uk in Tony Harrison’s Poetry brought to you by CORE provided by Apollo Xiaodong LIANG ∗ Henan Normal University Abstract: Tony Harrison is one of the representatives of the contemporary public poets whose poetry seems to be a language arena in which different narrative voices from different social milieus are imposed upon each other; whose different utterances ideologically orientated collide with each other at every nuance of the semantic level, and whose poetry features as double-voiced discourse. Due to this conspicuous feature, this thesis focuses its attention on the opposite voices in Harrison’s poetry, namely the voices of “Them” and “[uz]”, of the silent and the eloquent, and of his own forked tongue in order to work out the ideological meanings embedded in each discourse, to trace his split self in the conflicts between his education and his origin. Key Words: Tony Harrison’s poetry, conflicting voices, dialogic discourses, split self ∗ Liang Xiaodong is Professor of English Language and Literature at Faculty of International Studies of Henan Normal University. She was a visiting scholar of English Faculty, Cambridge University in 2001. She is particularly interested in Contemporary British and American poetry and fiction and has published many articles on them. Recently, she is working on the Contemporary British poetry, and Tony Harrison Studies is one of the projects. Her email address is [email protected] . Journal of Cambridge Studies 104 Introduction In talking about the major concerns of the contemporary British poetry, Neil Roberts has noticed that “class has continued to be a ground of contention in contemporary English poetry, and the most significant protagonist has been Tony Harrison.1 Indeed, Harrison is one of the representatives of public poets and “a tough-minded class warrior”, 2 fighting against discourse hegemony and oppression through his verbal weapons. His poems seem to be a language arena in which different voices speaking from different social milieus are imposed upon each other; in which different utterances ideologically orientated collide with each other at every nuance of the semantic level. Hence his poems are dialogic with several pairs of conflicting voices, which can be regarded as skaz defined by Bakhtin, the double-voiced discourse. Due to these conspicuous features, this thesis focuses its attention on his different voices, namely, the voices of “Them” and “[uz]”, the voices of the silent and the eloquent, and the voices of a forked tongue of his own in order to work out the ideological implications hidden in each discourse, and to trace his split self in the conflicts between his education and his origin. Them and [uz] A close reading finds that Harrison’s poems are embedded with skaz, one kind of "double-voiced utterance" in which two distinct voices - the author's speech and another's speech - are oriented toward one another within the same level of conceptual authority3.This double-voiced utterance has first been brought to the fore in his “School of Eloquence”, in which a working-class boy retraces his school days at the Grammar School in Leeds, recalling his own accent being strictly corrected and ruthlessly mocked by his teacher. He cannot pronounce the word “us” in RP, but clutching to his mother tongue as [uz]. Therefore, in the poem “Them and [uz]” arises two conflicting voices, the authoritative “Them” and the dominated but resisting “[uz]”. “Their” authoritative voice sounds anxious, responsible and scornful for the teacher shoulderes the responsibilities to cultivate the boy into civilized eloquent elite, and to remove his “barbarian” accent. Thus in the poem, we can hear the criticizing voice of the teacher first: 4 words only of mi ’art aches and… ‘Mine’s broken, you barbarian, T.W!’ He was nicely spoken. ‘Can’t have our glorious heritage done to death!’ I played the drunken Porter in Macbeth. ‘Poetry’s the speech of kings. You’re one of those Shakespeare gives comic bits to: prose! All poetry …you see ‘s been dubbed by [Λs] into RP … Your speech is in the hands of the Receivers.’ ‘We say [Λs] not [uz], T.W.! ’ That shut my trap. 1 Neil Roberts. Poetry and Class: Tony Harrison, Peter Reading, Ken Smith, Sean O’Brien in Neil Corcoran (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century English Poetry. Cambridge: CUP. 215-229, (2007) . 2 Luke Spencer. The Poetry of Tony Harrison. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester/Wheatsheaf. 95, (1994) . 3 See http://www.answers.com/topic/skaz, 2009. Vol 4. No.4 December 2009 Journal of Cambridge Studies 105 I doffed my flat a’s (as in ‘flat cap’) My mouth all stuffed with glottals, great Lumps to hawk up and spit out …E-nun-ci-ate! (122) The teacher coaches the boy the Received Pronunciation, the prestige standard accent matching poetry----“the speech of kings”, received by the “glorious heritage ”of literary and cultural traditions. However, the working-class boy is unable to pronounce even the simplest sound like [Λs] properly, and consequently he is rejected by “us”, the teacher on behalf, but allotted with a role of “a drunken man” who might be inarticulate in Macbeth. This poor boy suffers not only from the glottal pains but from the emotional offensiveness so far as the teacher contemptuously defines him as a “barbarian”, telling him off for having “our glorious heritage to death”. What is worse, the teacher seems to distain to call out his full name but “T.W.” which seems to reduce him to a sign. Hence, the teacher’s voice gestures his specific verbal manners of seeing and portraying the poor working class boy, potent with the stabilized ideological value judgments----to underestimate this lower class boy and his provincial dialect. And in this Skaz, the voice of the teacher is manipulating and dominating whereas the voice of the school boy is inarticulate and manipulated. The RP is enacted whilst the dialect is forced to be changed and corrected; the teacher is the speaking subject whereas the school boy is listening and “nicely” spoken of, accordingly he is the speaking object. Thereby, the boy’s narration has explored the class distinction and language oppression through the refraction of the teacher’s discourse. In this sense, the discourse in the above extraction has evident “double- voicedness”. However, where there is suppression, there is resistance. In the second part of this poem, the inarticulate boy comes to voice in his own accent, fighting for his own dialect as well as for his identity since “each social group---- each class, profession, generation, religion, region ----has its own dialect. Each dialect reflects and embodies a set of values and a sense of shared experience”.4 In this vein, the boy retorts his teacher as the follows: So right, yer buggers, then! We’ll occupy your lousy leasehold Poetry. I chewed up Litterer chewer and spat the bones Into the lap of dozing Daniel Jones, Dropped the initials I’d been harried as and used my name and own voice: [uz] [uz][uz], ended sentences with by, with, from and spoke the language that I spoke at home. RIP RP, RIP T.W. I’m Tony Harrison no longer you! You can tell the Receivers where to go (and no aspirate it) once you know Wordsworth’s matter/water are full rhymes, [uz]can be loving as well as funny. (123) 4Mikhail Bakhtin. in Ian Gregson. Contemporary Poetry and Postmodernism: Dialogue and Estrangement. London: Macmillan Press. 5, (1996). Journal of Cambridge Studies 106 The harassed school boy resorts to his own mother tongue, the vulgar and barbarian words “yer buggers”, to fight back against his bullying teacher, not meant the personal attacks but the public, directing to the bourgeoisies and their value judgments. The boy comes to be a speaking subject, cheering for his own mother tongue with the three-time repetitions of “[uz]”, which he shares with his own group, and which in his view, is both “loving and funny”; furthermore, he belittles poetry as “lousy leasehold” thing, and his capitalized “RIP RP” sound like a big hammer thudding, smashing the Received Pronunciation. In the long run, his “RIP T.W.” shows his resolution to rename and redefine himself, dropping the humiliating initials in order that he could use his full name to publish his poems rustic as those of Wordsworth’s with Cumbrian accent. The struggling voices for identity attune the same notes in another poem of “Heritage”. How you became a poet’s a mystery! Wherever did you get your talent from? I say: I had two uncles, Joe and Harry ----- One was a stammerer, the other dumb. (111) Here, we can hear two voices, one is questioning whilst the other is answering. They are socially distinct: the interrogative voice is loaded precisely with the point of view of bourgeoisies, questioning the identity of this poet. Its tone is full of suspicion and contempt. Its implication is “a man of such a breed like you can never be a poet”. “I had two uncles…/ one was stammer, the other dumb”, the answer seems to be digressive and irrelevant to the question; yet reading between the lines, we can see that they are the most eloquent answer to it. Metaphorically, the poet declares that his poetic talent is drawn from his inarticulate parents, whose silence and speechlessness have offered him the inner power to be a poet. As the poet later illustrated, … I had an inarticulate background, which gave me a deep hunger for all modes of articulation; I learned many languages, obsessively, and also threw myself into becoming a poet, which is for me a supreme and ceremonious mode of articulation.5 Indeed it is for the inarticulate that he has brought himself to be a poet, speaking in the form of poetry for his reticent parents and stammered uncles, and moreover for his own class.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Understanding the Value of Arts & Culture | the AHRC Cultural Value
    Understanding the value of arts & culture The AHRC Cultural Value Project Geoffrey Crossick & Patrycja Kaszynska 2 Understanding the value of arts & culture The AHRC Cultural Value Project Geoffrey Crossick & Patrycja Kaszynska THE AHRC CULTURAL VALUE PROJECT CONTENTS Foreword 3 4. The engaged citizen: civic agency 58 & civic engagement Executive summary 6 Preconditions for political engagement 59 Civic space and civic engagement: three case studies 61 Part 1 Introduction Creative challenge: cultural industries, digging 63 and climate change 1. Rethinking the terms of the cultural 12 Culture, conflict and post-conflict: 66 value debate a double-edged sword? The Cultural Value Project 12 Culture and art: a brief intellectual history 14 5. Communities, Regeneration and Space 71 Cultural policy and the many lives of cultural value 16 Place, identity and public art 71 Beyond dichotomies: the view from 19 Urban regeneration 74 Cultural Value Project awards Creative places, creative quarters 77 Prioritising experience and methodological diversity 21 Community arts 81 Coda: arts, culture and rural communities 83 2. Cross-cutting themes 25 Modes of cultural engagement 25 6. Economy: impact, innovation and ecology 86 Arts and culture in an unequal society 29 The economic benefits of what? 87 Digital transformations 34 Ways of counting 89 Wellbeing and capabilities 37 Agglomeration and attractiveness 91 The innovation economy 92 Part 2 Components of Cultural Value Ecologies of culture 95 3. The reflective individual 42 7. Health, ageing and wellbeing 100 Cultural engagement and the self 43 Therapeutic, clinical and environmental 101 Case study: arts, culture and the criminal 47 interventions justice system Community-based arts and health 104 Cultural engagement and the other 49 Longer-term health benefits and subjective 106 Case study: professional and informal carers 51 wellbeing Culture and international influence 54 Ageing and dementia 108 Two cultures? 110 8.
    [Show full text]
  • Iwas Lucky to Be in London in May and Catch
    The Scream REBECCA NEMSER I was lucky to be in London in May and catch Fram , Tony Harrison’s latest play,* in its short but spectacu - lar run at the Olivier Theatre at London’s National Theatre. The play, all in rhyming verse, begins in Westminster Abbey, with moonlight shining through the stained glass of the great Rose Window, casting a reflection of Aeschylus on the cold stone floor. In walks the ghost of Gilbert Murray (Jeff Rawle), rising up from his grave and carrying a tragic mask. Murray, the early-twentieth-century Oxford professor and classicist, was also a humanitarian, deeply involved in the League of Nations and the United Nations and co-founder of Oxfam. But since his death fifty years ago, his once-admired verse translations of Aeschylus and Euripides have been scorned, and the world he tried to save has been ravaged by even more unimaginable horrors. So instead of decomposing in his urn, he has spent his afterlife composing this play. He calls up the spirit of Sybil Thorndike (Sian Thomas, as splendid as the character she plays), the actress who tri - umphed on the London stage as Clytemnestra, Hecuba, and Medea in Murray’s once wildly popular versions, and whisks her off to the Olivier stalls of the National Theatre—for Fram is not just a play within a play, but a theater within a theater. Most of all, it is a poem about poetry. The hero of the play is Fridtjof Nansen (Jasper Britton), Murray’s long-ago friend (and admirer of his translations)— the dashing Norwegian scientist, artist, and Arctic explorer *Tony Harrison, Fram .
    [Show full text]
  • 2016 Latham Caroline 123237
    This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Reanimating Greek Tragedy How Contemporary Poets Translate for the Stage Latham, Caroline Susan Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 27. Sep. 2021 Reanimating Greek Tragedy How Contemporary Poets Translate for the Stage Caroline Susan Latham Degree: Doctor of Philosophy in Classics Research (Field of study: the modern reception of Greek tragedy) 1 Abstract This thesis starts from the premise that modern poets have proved effective translators of Greek tragedy for the stage and is a hermeneutic consideration of why and how they succeeded.
    [Show full text]
  • 2021 PDF Catalogue
    Spring & Summer CATALOGUE2021 Contents 3 Spring & Summer Selection 4 Featured Title When I Think of My Body as a Horse by Wendy Pratt 6 Featured Title Talking to Stanley on the Telephone by Michael Schmidt 9 The PB Bookshelf The AQI by David Tait 10 The North 11 New Poets List Ugly Bird by Lauren Hollingsworth-Smith Have a nice weekend I think you’re interesting by Lucy Holt Aunty Uncle Poems by Gboyega Odubanjo Takeaway by Georgie Woodhead 14 Forthcoming Titles 15 Subject Codes Pamphlet | 9781912196418 | £6 Black Mascara (Waterproof) eBook | 9781912196517 | £4.50 Published 1st Feb 2021 Rosalind Easton 34pp Black Mascara (Waterproof) is a glamorous and lively debut exploring Rosalind Easton grew up in Salisbury and relationships, popular culture, and the enduring power of teenage memories. now lives in South East London, where she works as an English teacher. After a first degree at Exeter University, she trained as Full of wicked invention. – Imtiaz Dharker a dance teacher and spent several years Love and the possibilities of love and intimacy are examined and celebrated teaching tap, modern and ballet before completing her PGCE at Bristol and MA at and quotidian adventures like bra fittings and running mascara are given the Goldsmiths. She has recently completed her power of myth. – Ian McMillan PhD thesis on Sarah Waters. Black Mascara (Waterproof) is her first collection. Witty, sexy poems that strut across the page – Natalie Whittaker Pamphlet | 9781912196425 | £6 In Your Absence eBook | 9781912196524 | £4.50 Published 1st Feb 2021 Jill Penny 36pp In Your Absence is a response to a year of bereavement, a murder and a trial, Jill Penny is from a touring theatre and estrangements, departures and insights.
    [Show full text]
  • On Not Being Tony Harrison: Tradition and the Individual Talent of David Dabydeen
    On Not Being Tony Harrison: Tradition and the Individual Talent of David Dabydeen LEE M.JENKINS ^^)NE OF THE MORE unusual critical responses to T. S. Eliot is surely David Dabydeen's claim that "Eliot is the parent of Carib• bean poetry." Indeed, Dabydeen himself feels the need to qualify his remark before he makes it, when he says that Eliot assumes this parental role "in a peculiar sense" (Grant 211). On a thematic level, much of the work of the British-based Indo-Caribbean poet Dabydeen is to do with absent parents (the poet's actual parents, his parent country of Guyana and the Caribbean parent language, Creole; now living in England, Dabydeen shares with Eliot the sta• tus of metoikos, or resident alien); on a formal level, his poetry is less a quest for origins than it is a turbulent — by turns loving and loathing, respectful and rebellious — relationship with Eliot and other literary progenitors from Homer to Tony Harrison.1 Dabydeen's agon with Eliot is evident from his first collection, Slave Song (1984). The poet's use of Creole in this collection is, on one level, a testament of authenticity and, paradoxically given Dabydeen's tide, a proclamation of emancipation from the influ• ence of Eliot and Western literary tradition: this black vernacular is a language which, despite its "capacity for a savage lyricism" per• mits no level of abstraction, so "you cannot have the Four Quartets in Creole" (Binder 171, 170). Notwithstanding this, the innova• tion of contemporary Black British and Caribbean poetry suggests a certain continuity with Eliot; prior to these poetries, Dabydeen has argued, "the last great innovator in British poetry this century has been T.
    [Show full text]
  • House of Atreus Syllabus
    Greek 114: Honors Seminar in Greek Drama The House of Atreus in Greek Tragedy: Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Electra, Eurpides’ Orestes Grace Ledbetter This seminar is a close reading of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Electra, and Eurpides’ Orestes. We will also read the entire Oresteia, Eurpides’ Electra and Iphigeneia plays in English. Copies of these Greek and English texts are available in the bookstore, in addition to Aristotle’s Poetics and Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, which we will also consider in the course of our discussions. Required texts: 1) J. D. Denniston and D. L. Page, Aeschylus Agamemnon, Clarendon. 2) J. H. Kells, Sophocles Electra, Cambridge. 3) T. M. Falkner, Euripdes’ Orestes, Bryn Mawr Commentaries. 4) Fagles, trans, Oresteia 5) Eur. Electra, Iphegeneia in Aulis, Iphigeneia in Tauris in English 6) Aristotle, Poetics. 7) Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy. Work for the Course: 1) weekly translation and reading assignments 2) approximately bi-weekly oral presentations on specific passages or other readings. 3) three 8-10 page papers, integrating secondary literature, which will be due during weeks when there is no Greek reading assignment. 4) final exam: translation only. Syllabus: Week 1 background readings and video of Tony Harrison’s and Peter Hall’s Agamemnon (National Theater of Great Britain). P. Wilson, “Powers of horror and laughter: the great age of drama” in O. Taplin, ed. Literature in the Greek World, Oxford, 2000 Cambridge History of Classical Literature: Greek Literature. tragedy chapters Gantz, Early Greek Myth. (The Line of Tantalos; Agamemnon; Orestes; Iphigeneia). Aeschylus’ Oresteia in English. Fagles translation Agamemnon 1-39 in Greek Week 2 Agamemnon 1-354 (with Denniston-Page; Fraenkel) R.
    [Show full text]
  • Tony Harrison's Prometheus: a View from the Left
    Tony Harrison’s Prometheus: A View from the Left EDITH HALL Fire and poetry, two great powers that mek this so-called gods’ world OURS! Old Man, who has become Pro- metheus, to an audience of miners1 IN 1998 TONY HARRISON’S first feature film was screened at some esoteric venues, broadcast on uk Channel 4 television, and subsequently disappeared almost completely from public view. Outside the uk it has made little impres- sion. Nobody got very excited about Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound in 1820, either. Yet I am convinced that the eye of history will later view Harrison’s Prometheus as the most im- portant artistic reaction to the fall of the British working class as the twentieth century staggered to its close, a fall symptomatic of the international collapse of the socialist dream. The film also offers the most important adaptation of classical myth for a radical political purpose for years, and (with the possible exception of his stage play The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus) the most brilliant artwork Tony Harrison has yet produced. Harrison believes that the ancient Greek tragedy entitled Prometheus Bound is by Aeschylus, the poet of the Athenian democratic revolution. Aeschylus’ Prometheus is wilful, stub- born, audacious, gloomy, inspirational, intellectual, poetic, and has a diachronic view of history allowing him to see far away across the world, far into the past and equally far into the future. Harrison’s film is also wilful, stubborn, audacious, gloomy, inspirational, intellectual, poetic, with an interna- tional perspective and diachronic view of history. It escorts its audience on a procession of arresting images leading from northern England to eastern Europe and Greece, via the bomb- 130 tony harrison’s PROMETHEUS ing of Dresden, the collapse of socialism and the Holocaust.
    [Show full text]
  • The Land That Rises Dialect As Unheimlich Vol 1 K0835401 Morris
    THE LAND THAT RISES: DIALECT AS UNHEIMLICH IN BRITISH WRITING CATHERINE MORRIS A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Kingston University September, 2018 Volume 1 Abstract This thesis is in two parts. The first is a critical analysis of the use of dialect as unheimlich in British writing. Using Freud’s essay, The Uncanny (1919), as its basis, this thesis will argue that the use of dialect creates tension within a text between the representation of home, and of that which may be considered unhomely. Reading a range of British texts psychoanalytically alongside sociolinguistic studies, this thesis seeks to show how an author’s choice of dialect-use within their literary form is bound up with an unheimlich mind-set of dialect within both writer and reader, whilst considering the cultural and historical contexts in which these attitudes are based. A range of unheimlich notions may be read from dialect, and its use is to be repressed or rejected as abject and replaced with the more accessible standard English associated with education, adulthood, civilisation and power. Yet it might also be read that, through standard English, the ‘strange’ has been brought into our homes and our mouths, made familiar through the hegemonic appropriation of the ‘mother tongue’. Whilst the hearing of spoken accents and dialects within various medias has become increasingly common, negative connotations remain, especially when presented in the written form; what might be familiar to the ear remains strange to the eye. Its use divides readers as to its necessity and desirability, suggesting there is a long way to go before dialects are accepted fully in literary terms.
    [Show full text]
  • Classics, Class, and Cloaca: Harrison's Humane Coprology
    Classics, Class, and Cloaca: Harrison’s Humane Coprology EDITH HALL In 1975, Tony Harrison published his transla - tion of a selection of epigrams by Palladas, a fourth-century citizen of Alexandria and one of the last pagan poets. Harri - son had been inspired by Peter Jay’s modern verse transla - tions of ancient Greek epigrams, mostly drawn from the Greek Anthology. 1 Palladas’ cynical voice clearly struck a chord in the alienated young Harrison, who described it at the time as “the authentic snarl of a man trapped physically in poverty and persecution, and metaphysically in a deep sense of the futile.” 2 Through this separate edition Harrison rescued the distinctive individual voice of the ancient poet from centuries of anthologized oblivion. Amongst the verses Harrison chose to translate (which include satirical lines on the problems involved in reading canonical literature, misog - ynist tirades, and meditations on the brevity of life) is this succinct assault on another poet: Where’s the public good in what you write, raking it in from all that shameless shite, hawking iambics like so much Betterbrite ? (Harrison’s no. 43 = The Greek Anthology 11 .291 ) Bad poetry, composed to make money, is “shameless shite,” which rhymes with Betterbrite . The poet whom Palladas is attacking is compared with someone selling lamp oil, and it seems that Harrison has here invented a new product, inspired by the famous British “direct sales” company Betterware, whose inexpensive range of cleaning and other household arion 15.2 fall 2007 112 classics, class, and cloaca products was (and still is) sold by door-to-door salesmen and is culturally associated with aspirational, petit bourgeois house - wives.
    [Show full text]
  • LEEDS-2023-FINAL-STAGE-1-BID-BOOK.Pdf
    WEAVING US TOGETHER Ready leeds2023.co.uk [email protected] Ready for the challenge Twitter @Leeds_2023 Ready to take risks Facebook /2023Leeds Ready to connect Richard Moran Bill, Phoenix Theatre Dance Triple Instagram @leeds2023 We also have our challenges. Whilst people We’ll explore our heritage and ask honest, Whilst in the past Europe has been defined Q.1 have made room here to enjoy their own searching questions about our place in the by empires and nations we believe the future cultures, Leeds as a city has struggled to world and specifically in a new Europe. As well dialogue and connections will be made WHY DOES YOUR CITY WISH articulate our identity, and therefore have as the economic benefits, we think culture can by cities like ours. We think it is the Free TO TAKE PART IN THE COMPETITION confidence to shout about ourselves. There’s help weave us together as people. Movement of Ideas that can be at the heart of FOR THE TITLE OF EUROPEAN heartfelt pride in our civic, business and a new connected Europe and that Leeds has CAPITAL OF CULTURE? sporting achievements and yet we’ve rarely But the changes in the world in the last couple the scale, ambition and partnerships to test celebrated our cultural successes. of years have made us realise our bid can, and that theory with other European cities. must, be about even more. Jo Cox MP, in her The city has accomplished cultural institutions maiden speech to the UK Parliament said: Leeds is at a tipping point.
    [Show full text]
  • Barbarian Masquerade a Reading of the Poetry of Tony Harrison And
    1 Barbarian Masquerade A Reading of the Poetry of Tony Harrison and Simon Armitage Christian James Taylor Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of English August 2015 2 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation fro m the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement The right of Christian James Taylor to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. © 2015 The University of Leeds and Christian James Taylor 3 Acknowledgements The author hereby acknowledges the support and guidance of Dr Fiona Becket and Professor John Whale, without whose candour, humour and patience this thesis would not have been possible. This thesis is d edicat ed to my wife, Emma Louise, and to my child ren, James Byron and Amy Sophia . Additional thanks for a lifetime of love and encouragement go to my mother, Muriel – ‘ never indifferent ’. 4 Abstract This thesis investigates Simon Armitage ’ s claim that his poetry inherits from Tony Harrison ’ s work an interest in the politics o f form and language, and argues that both poets , although rarely compared, produce work which is conceptually and ideologically interrelated : principally by their adoption of a n ‘ un - poetic ’ , deli berately antagonistic language which is used to invade historically validated and culturally prestigious lyric forms as part of a critique of canons of taste and normative concepts of poetic register which I call barbarian masquerade .
    [Show full text]
  • Cork Spring Poetry Festival 15-182012 February Dear Patron, for Years Cork Was a Region Which Produced Major Short Story Writers
    Cork Spring Poetry Festival 15-182012 February Dear Patron, For years Cork was a region which produced major short story writers. She still brings forth many writers of fiction and plays, but in the past thirty years she has been most prodigious in fostering poets. Here is the festival brochure for the first Cork Spring Poetry Festival. The Munster Literature Centre has been presenting Spring literary festivals in Cork for over fifteen years. This year we have decided to make the festival exclusively poetry in acknowledgement of the preference for poetry by our past Spring Festival audiences and also to celebrate Cork’s poetic heritage at a time when the country has just acquired its first poet President. This year at our festival we have poets from eight countries. From Ireland we have poets writing in Irish such as Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, and Irish poets writing in English such as Kerry Hardie and Thomas McCarthy, as well as many others, both established poets and some with their first book published. The United States is represented by senior poet Gregory Orr from Virginia, not only a great poet and teacher of poetry but a veteran activist of the Civil Rights movement. From America comes also ethnic Palestinian Nathalie Handal and Cork exile, now US citizen, Greg Delanty. From the UK we have poets and industry luminaries Fiona Sampson and Neil Astley who will be making a special presentation from his Being Human anthology - the latest in a phenomenal best-selling series. Poets from Canada, Croatia, Italy, New Zealand and Slovenia are also represented.
    [Show full text]